Migrating to a new host using only the hard drive from my old one?

My previous host went out of business. They are sending me the hard drive with all of my clients and data on it. I already signed up for hosting with a new company, so I'm just waiting for the drive to arrive so I can move all the data there. Can I simply use this drive as the boot device for a virtual machine and go into my cpanel/whm installation to generate and move the backup archives to my new server? Or is there more to it than that?

Thanks for the reply. I don't think there are any generated backups on the drive. I would have to generate them on my own. Am I correct in assuming I can load up the drive and access cpanel/whm locally?

Staff Member

Assuming the drive includes the full OS and cPanel installation, then you should be able to use it as your primary drive when booting the machine. If it only includes cPanel-related account files, then that would require manual intervention.

I got the drive. It has the full OS, cpanel, and my data. Unfortunately I can't boot from the drive. It looks like its going to work, but it stops and says "Kernel panic - not synching: Attempted to kill init!". Any suggestions?

Basically, the messages immediately preceding that one should give an idea what is happening. The best course of action would be to contact your new provider or datacenter to have them help troubleshoot this issue.